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He’ll Google for you

My former Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo is out the gate early with an elaborate and delightful April Fool’s stunt called “I Google For You.” Check it out.

I can’t figure out if it’s truly the latter-day, John Henry, man vs. machine thing it purports to be, or whether there’s in fact some Eliza-style script behind the scenes cranking out the slightly customized search results. Since upon inputting one query I learned I was 84th in the queue, yet I received a link to my answer in an emailed reply within a minute or so, something tells me there’s more machine than man at work here.